ART REVIEW; Thousand-Year-Old Silks, Virtually Gold and Really So

A millennium ago, the great chain of caravan cities and shrines called the silk road looped its way across Central Asia, linking China and the Roman Empire. Pilgrims, potentates and artists alike traveled the route. So did material goods, plain and precious, including porcelain, spice and silk.

Of these, silk was the most coveted, both as a rock-solid currency of trade and as a tribute guaranteed to please. Whether worn on state occasions by Chinese emperors, preserved in the tombs of Mongol rulers or sewn into liturgical robes for medieval popes, its beauty and rarity lent it a kind of mystical aura.

More than a glimmer of that aura comes through in the exhibition titled ''When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles in the Metropolitan and Cleveland Museums of Art,'' which opened at the Met this week. Drawn entirely from the holdings of the two museums, it is a display of 65 pieces of silk embroidery, tapestry and brocade from the 8th to 15th centuries.

And ''pieces'' are literally what's on view. Of the oceans of silk textile that must have been produced in earlier centuries, only vestiges survive. And this show has a reliquary feel. With a few spectacular exceptions, it is a collection of fragments: a bit of a cuff, a length of hem, a swatch of uncertain provenance (snipped from a temple banner, perhaps, or from a favorite item of imperial evening wear?) measuring just inches across.

Yet even such fragments can conjure up a lost grandeur. And together they are reminders of a time, not so different in some ways from our own, when a world of disparate beliefs and technologies interacted: in the art it was often hard to tell where one cultural tradition left off and another began.

No more striking sense of that cosmopolitan climate can be found than in the exhibition's knockout opening work: an immaculately preserved child's jacket-and-trouser set, dating from the eighth century and now in the Cleveland Museum.

Recent examination reveals that the silk of the jacket was woven in the area of Central Asia called Sogdiana (in what is now Uzbekistan), where for a time West and East productively rubbed shoulders, though its jazzy pattern of red and yellow ducks on a green-black ground is Persian. The silk of the pants comes from China, where its white-on-white design of birds and rosette was popular during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906).

Other pieces have similarly mixed pedigrees. Byzantine horsemen trot stiffly across a shred of Sogdian weave. An enthusiastic crowd of hunters from Egypt or Syria find their way onto silk road cloth.

A dragon touching down on a brightly colored strip of silk tapestry from eastern Central Asia is an age-old Chinese symbol but here has the elephantine snout of a mythical beast from India.

It is China itself, where silk was born, that plays the central role in the show. And the work it produced is transcendent, from a piece of brocaded grass-green silk from the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) with tear-drop medallions of swans stitched in gold thread, to a tapestry from the Southern Sung (1127-1279) with flowers so exquisitely worked that they appear to be painted.

The bulk of the Chinese selection is devoted to the work of the Buddhist Mongols who ruled from 1279 to 1368 and called themselves the Yuan Dynasty. Formerly a nomadic people, they valued portability, and for them textiles were the supreme art form. It is no surprise that the Mongol dominance of both China and Central Asia produced what is probably the most fabled of all luxury silks, cloth of gold.

Of the several examples of these textiles with designs in gold and silver thread, one in particular stands out, both for its elegant, half-abstract design of dragon-headed falcons and because its high status value is irrefutably documented. A strip of almost identical cloth is shown on the collar of the wife of the legendary Yuan emperor Kublai Khan in a famous painted portrait that visited New York two years ago with the show ''Splendors of Imperial China,'' from the National Palace Museum in Taiwan.

The most elaborate Mongol silks, though, were those made as religious icons.

The show's largest work is nearly 12 feet wide and is based on Tibetan models of a mandala, a diagram of the spiritual universe. It has the mesmerizing look of a gargantuan jigsaw puzzle, every piece in place, right down to the royal patrons praying fervently in the corners.

A second, smaller, simpler mandala has the mountain that is the axis of the world sitting like a vase surrounded by a galaxy of charming miniature landscapes in orthodox Chinese style, each representing a continent afloat on the cosmic sea.

A taste for both the monumental and the whimsical, with the two often combined, persisted into the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), as one sees in a stupendous silk hanging depicting the multi-armed Buddhist deity Yamantaka.

With its vivid colors, exacting but playful composition and technical ingenuity (knotted threads simulate tiny jewels), it is one of the masterpieces of Chinese embroidery and a fitting culmination to the textile tradition sketched out in the show.

And ''When Silk Was Gold'' is a sketch, as its organizers, James C. Y. Watt, senior research curator in the department of Asian art at the Met, and Anne E. Wardwell, retired curator of textiles at the Cleveland Museum, readily acknowledge.

The collecting of this material is a fairly recent phenomenon, and this survey, while it covers a lot of ground, is necessarily incomplete. It says something that nearly a third of the works in the catalogue are being published for the first time.

The catalogue is, incidentally, a crucial supplement to the exhibition. It offers not only the customary overview of the subject under scrutiny but also a wealth of information either historically or technically too complicated to be spelled out in exhibition wall texts.

The movement of artisans throughout the politically tumultuous terrain encompassed by the Western term silk road is, for example, still poorly understood. And often the physical characteristics that help identify a fabric's place and date of origin are all but invisible to the unaided eye: such defining elements as types of thread and weave structures, for example, can be examined only under the microscope.

This invaluable book by Mr. Watt and Ms. Wardwell (with a solid introductory essay by Morris Rossabi) includes just such technical data. But must it be consulted to enjoy the show? Not at all. The textiles, even in shreds and patches, speak for themselves.

And perhaps one can hear their voice most clearly by considering materials closer at hand: the cotton twill (''Made in China'') of your shirt sleeve; the lapel of your jacket (Scottish tweed) or the winter scarf advertised as hand-knitted but where and of what and by whom? Like the luxury silks of centuries ago, these things also have their stories to tell.

''When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles in the Metropolitan and Cleveland Museums of Art'' remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82d Street, through May 17. The show has been financed in part by Met Life.